Free Despite the Falling Snow by Shamim Sarif Page A

pool out and edge down his cheeks. She touches his head affectionately, then stands and briskly gets out a box of tape and bandages.
    “Shall I take him to the nurse?” Svetlana asks, half-rising from her chair.
    “I’ll manage,” Katya replies.
    “But all injuries are supposed to be reported to the nurse…”
    Svetlana’s voice trails away, silenced by Katya’s look of disbelief.
    “It’s not a sin to do things differently now and then, Svetlana,” she says, with a laugh in her voice. Svetlana subsides, her full lips pursed hard against the mockery.
    Katya cuts a small piece of tape, and applies it to the bandaged knee.
    “There you are. Is that better?”
    The boy looks down, uncertain.
    “You are a brave young man, aren’t you?” she says.
    He looks at her, suspicious. Her amiable, kind tone is unexpected, and he turns suddenly and runs away. Katya watches him go with a small pain in her heart, and some anger flashing in her eyes. Not at the boy, but at everything that has made him push her away. She is almost sitting down at her desk again when she suddenly stands instead, and the abrupt scraping of her chair, together with the metallic slam of the office door which Katya throws open make Svetlana look up, wide-eyed. But Katya is already gone, her chair having fallen to the floor.
    She is running down the hallway. It is silent and deserted, for the children have now started their final lesson. But as she flies down the corridor, and turns a corner, she sees her little boy, the one with the cut knee; he is almost back at his classroom. He stares at the woman bearing down on him, and she stops, and they watch each other for a moment. She considers. Another kind word and he will probably run again.
    “Come here,” Katya tells him, with authority, despite the fact that she is suddenly unsure quite what she is doing, following this unknown child.
    He frowns, and then slowly begins the walk down the corridor towards her. He stands before her, and she looks down at the top of his head, her arms folded.
    “Please,” she says. “Please don’t run from me like that,” she says, her voice soft and kind now.
    Quickly, she passes her fingers through his hair, caressing it, tidying it, and then she turns and walks back down the corridor. She can hear the echoing of her own footfalls clamouring back at her from the hollow walls, but she can hear nothing else. She turns again, and looks at the boy, standing there, still watching her. His soft eyes are too large, too tentatively adoring, too thrilled. She closes her own eyes against them.
    “Go back to your lesson,” she says, pushing a tone of command into her voice, and he runs from her, back to the classroom.
    “Where did you go to?” Svetlana’s timid voice makes Katya want to snap back a reply.
    “Bathroom,” she says.
    “Oh.”
    She suspects very strongly that her secretary’s main purpose in life, or at least here at school, is to watch her. Either she is one of those people whose lives are so dull and mean that she keeps herself from boredom by spying on everyone around her, or she has a definite instruction from someone, somewhere to keep an eye on Katya. This would not be unusual, given that Katya’s parents were killed under Stalin, as enemies of the state; and her brother Yuri’s subsequent escape to the United States did nothing to help the situation. But then, Katya has always relished a challenge, and began her campaign for acceptance and credibility in the Party long ago as a young Pioneer. In her smart uniform – a red hat and scarf over a white shirt, which were some of the best pieces of clothing she owned – she had stood in an orderly row and sworn solemnly to uphold the ideals of Lenin and Stalin. She still remembers the thundering sound of hundreds of childish voices around her, echoing around the hall in which they stood. Soon after that, she had calmly signed a denouncement of her parents, requested of her at the age of thirteen